The total wealth of Britain's households in 2018 to 2020 was approximately £2.2 trillion less than was previously believed - a 14% reduction. That, at least, is the implication of a recent change in methodology made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to the UK's leading official...

This report gives a new and up-to-date picture of the giving and receiving of significant intergenerational wealth transfers during life, summarising the findings of two research papers. New data from the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) allow us to build a comprehensive picture of the flow of...

Why do the children of wealthy parents accumulate more wealth than children from poorer backgrounds? Does parental wealth have a role in determining young people's earnings, saving choices, returns to wealth and access to homeownership? How much wealth do parents give directly to their children?...

The current system of private pension savings in the UK is based on employers choosing a workplace pension provider, to which contributions from the employee and employer are sent, and which invests the contributions on behalf of the employee. This means that when an individual leaves their...

This report discusses how public policy should change to bring about better outcomes in retirement for employees through their accumulation of private pension wealth. In doing so, we draw on new modelling undertaken as part of the Pensions Review (O'Brien, Sturrock and Cribb, 2024) as well as...

There have been widespread concerns about the patterns of retirement saving amongst self-employed workers, who now make up just over one in eight of the whole labour force. Most strikingly, the fraction of self-employed workers earning over £10,000 who are making contributions to a private...

Although older generations have substantially more wealth than their recent predecessors did at the same age, younger generations do not. Bringing together UK data on those born between the 1930s and 1980s and a lifecycle model of saving, I quantify whether this is due to changes in preferences...

Why do the children of wealthy parents accumulate more wealth than children from poorer backgrounds? Does parental wealth have a role in determining young people's earnings, saving choices, returns to wealth and access to homeownership? How much wealth do parents give directly to their children?...

We document key patterns in the flow of significant gifts and loans between friends and family in Great Britain, using newly-available data from the Wealth and Assets Survey. We identify a number of new stylised facts. Gifts and loans are generally intergenerational transfers: 83% of the value...